Lots of News

I don’t know what it is.  I’ve been complaining for a while now about being busy and I just can’t seem to shake it.  In fact it only seems to get worse every week.  I’m on my second straight week in Redmond this week – family’s not happy about that :)  I’ve been trying to figure out what is taking so much of my time.  I think it’s many things.  In the last 2 months I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time reviewing progress across all of VS/VSTS2010/.NET4.0 trying to understand the project state and help determine the Beta 1 release schedule and estimate the Beta 2 and RTM schedule.  The other “new” thing that’s been taking up time is work beginning to plan our next release (no code name – we’ll probably call it something boring like VS11 :)).  We had our first leadership offsite on the topic last month and spent 2.5 days with our MVPs talking about it this week.  Other than that it’s same-old same-old: Talk with customers, manage development, play with the product, work with partners, …

So, this is the first post in quite a while.  I’m committed to getting back into my cadence of 10-15 a month but I’m not sure exactly when that will be.  At least I’m mostly keeping up with blog comments and answering people’s questions :)  This is going to be a recap of a bunch of miscellaneous news (some of it kind of old – sorry about that).

1. Martin Danner has published a new CodePlex project called Team Foundation Adapters.  It is a set of mock objects to help with unit testing TFS extensions.
2. CHOULANT Noham has published an update to his Codeplex project of TFS PowerShell extensions.  We are talking with him about how it might be possible to take his work as contributions and combine it with the TFS Power Tools PowerShell commandlets.  Obviously there are lots of challenges there but if we could do that it would be a first for us and very unusual for Microsoft.  We’ll see where it leads us.
3. Mohammed Alam has published a new tool that enables email notifications when load tests complete.  These notifications include the load test results.
4. The TFS Admin tool on CodePlex has proved to be a VERY valuable resource for people.  Unfortunately it has been slowly atrophying from lack of attention.  The TFS team has been so busy getting TFS 2010 ready for Beta 1 we just haven’t had time to think about it.  Thankfully, at the MVP summit this week, Michael Ruminer volunteer to drive a community effort to refresh the tool.  The most pressing need is to make it work when TFS is installed on Windows 2008.  However, he’d like to do more.  So, if you have requests, please go to the CodePlex project and register your suggestions.
5. Over the past year or so, Microsoft has been developing a standard baseline TFS process template for Microsoft product teams to use.  It is designed to capture many of our processes and practices and prevent teams from having to reinvent them.  It is called the Microsoft Process Template (or MPT for short).  With the help of Ed Blankenship (another of our devout MVPs) we have published the template on CodePlex for anyone to see/use.  Now, a word of caution…  This not your standard “Agile” process template.  I actually suspect few people will want to use it directly.  It is very customized to processes we use to ship very large projects with thousands of people.  Many of you will find it too heavy weight.  However, it is, at a minimum, interesting.  And with luck, you may find some stuff in there that will give you some ideas on things you might do with your own processes.  You can read more about it on Ed’s blog here: http://www.edsquared.com/2009/02/27/Microsoft+Process+Template.aspx
6. The Microsoft TFS support team has created a blog to share information about troubleshooting and fixing issues with TFS.  As they learn things through support interactions with customers they write about it in their blog.  It’s a useful resource for helping you understand TFS better: http://blogs.msdn.com/dstfs/
7. A couple of weeks ago, we announced a partnership with Quest Software to provide support for Oracle using the Team System Development/Database Edition tools.  You can read more about it here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2009/feb09/02-24ZanderQA.mspx or here http://blogs.msdn.com/dseven/archive/2009/02/24/oracle-support-announced-for-visual-studio-team-system-2010-development.aspx
8. Notion Solutions, one of our best services partners, recently entered the Team System add-on space by releasing “Notion Tools for Team System v1.0”.  The include Notion Timesheet, Notion Work Organizer, Notion Work Planner and Notion Work Item Controls.

That’s all I can find in my inbox from the past few weeks but I’m sure I’ve missed something.  I’ll try not to let so much build up again.

Brian